Scientists are flocking to DeepSeek-R1, a cheap and powerful artificial intelligence (AI) ‘reasoning’ model that sent the US stock market spiralling after it was released by a Chinese firm last week.

First peer-reviewed study shows how a Chinese start-up firm made the market-shaking LLM for US$300,000. R1 is designed to excel at ‘reasoning’ tasks such as mathematics and coding, and is a cheaper ...